Readers' comments

This article speaks nothing about the racial tension between Black Kenyans and Somalis, tension which fuels Kenyan intolerance for Somalis. There is the feeling that Somalis look down on blacks and this infuriates Kenyans who wonder why the Somalis are in Kenya if they hate blacks so much. This tension needs to be addressed.

I was walking home on 4th Street when three RP [Regular Police] officers—one woman
and two men—stopped me. I showed them my refugee documents and they just
attacked me. The woman grabbed my breasts and shoulders and tried to lift my veil
and then pushed me into a ditch by the roadside. Then all three hit and kicked me and
tore at my clothes. The woman was shouting ‘you are a prostitute’ and ‘you Somalis
are all Al-Shabaab and terrorists.’ Then they put me in their car and we drove off. It
was dark so I did not know where we were. When we stopped, the woman and one of
the men got out of the car and left me in the car with the other man who hit my legs
with his truncheon and slapped me. Then he raped me. When he finished he got out of
the car and the other man got in and raped me. When it was over, they drove me for
some time and then shouted at me to get out of the car. Then they just drove away.
Human Rights Watch interview with 34-year-old Somali woman living with her four
children in Eastleigh since 2008, Eastleigh, Nairobi, February 4, 2013. i wonder why HIV is so prevalent in kenya, even female officers are participating rape cases

As the kenyan former prime minister Moi publicly enthused about the kenyan involvement of somali civil war, his miscalculation of fuelling his neighbours problem backfires him . kenyans should not see themselves a victim of somali terrorism and piracy but should understand they are partially responsible.

No, but the attention should not always be focused on the abusers without addressing the root causes. The media tries far too much to give a "balanced" view and place the blame on all sides rather than accept the fact that while both sides may be doing abhorrent things, one is clearly worse than the other.

It happened just this week with the EDL in London when the press chose to make the primary societal concern the rise of the far-right rather than the rise of Muslim populations. It's absolutely true that the EDL and their ilk are nothing more than disgusting fascists, but their brand of violence is more akin to football hooligans than terrorists and a distinction has to be made.

And for what it's worth, the article above did a fine job highlighting abuse by the Kenyan authorities, so I didn't feel the need to further discuss that.

Imagine you're a young man in Somalia. You have no land, no connections, no education, and the sum total of your whole family's possessions would fetch about $3.73, less postage, on eBay, if you'd ever heard of eBay that is.

The difficulty is that, given the level of (non-)governance in Somalia, anything that the people there do to make a living in what you or I would consider a normal manner will simply get stolen from them by one group of fighters or another. The place is a beautiful illustration of the libertarian ideal . . . and what happens when it meets reality.

After the collapse of the central government in the ... civil war, the Somali Navy disbanded. With Somali territorial waters undefended, foreign fishing trawlers began illegally fishing on the Somali seaboard and ships from big companies started dumping waste off the coast of Somalia. This led to the erosion of the fish stock. Local fishermen subsequently started to band together to protect their resources.[5][8][32] After seeing the profitability of ransom payments, some financiers and former militiamen later began to fund pirate activities, splitting the profits evenly with the pirates.[33] In most of the hijackings, the pirates have not harmed their prisoners.

The present government is doing its best to make the country livable again, and put an end to the climate that created all that piracy in the first place. They're doing what you ask. But nothing happens overnight.

Was your first comment just a bit of random moralising about the inadvisability of abandoning your responsibilities?

As for the Woolwich murder... how do you draw that connection? "In the Muslim world, there is no personal responsibility for a terrorist criminal action" - where did you get that "fact" from, and what does it have to do with the topic?